Infantry units serving in foreign and colonial stations are frequently split up into detachments consisting of one or more companies, and serving each at a different place. This detachment duty, as it is called, as often as not involves life under canvas, and it may be understood that life under the tropical or sub-tropical conditions of foreign and colonial stations can be a very pleasant thing. Here, as in home stations, sufficient work is provided to keep the soldier from overmuch meditation. Time is allowed, however, for sport and recreation, and, even when thrown entirely on their own resources for amusement, troops are capable of making the time pass quickly and easily. While on the subject of camping there is one more yarn of South Africa and the war which merits telling, although it only concerns a bad case of “nerves.” It happened during the last year of the war that a column crossed the Modder River from south to north, going in the direction of Brandfort, and camp was pitched for the night just to the north of the Glen Drift. At this point in its course the Modder runs between steep, cliff-like banks, from which a belt of mimosa scrub stretches out for nearly a quarter of a mile on each side of the river. After camp had been pitched for the night, the sentries round about the camp were finally posted with a special view to guarding the drift, the northward front of the column, and its flanks. Only two or three sentries, however, were considered necessary to protect the rear, which rested on the impenetrable belt of mimosa scrub along the river bank. One of these sentries along the scrub came on duty at midnight, just after the moon had gone down. He “took over” from the sentry who preceded him on the post, and started to keep watch according to orders, though in his particular position there was little enough to watch. Quite suddenly he grew terribly afraid, not with a natural kind of fear, but with the nightmarish kind of terror that children are known to experience in the dark. His reason told him that in the position that he occupied there was nothing which could possibly harm him, for behind him was the bush, through which a man could not even crawl, while before him and to either side was the chain of sentries, of which he formed a part, surrounding his sleeping comrades. His imagination, however, or possibly his instinct, insisted that something uncanny and evil was watching him from the darkness of the tangled mimosa bushes, and was waiting a chance to strike at him in some horrible fashion. He tried to shake off this childish fear, to assure himself that it could not possibly be other than a trick of “nerves” brought on by darkness and the need for keeping watch, when--crash!--something struck him with tremendous force in the back and sent him forward on his face.